Stokes
by Reno Spiegel
Summary: They say that old habits die hard...to be honest, some never do die...


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Stokes  
  
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For Chocobo Goddess  
  
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Reno Spiegel  
  
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The day is hot and sticky as the man sits at the bar, chewing at a stubborn peanut with a bad taste in his left cheek and watching the ShinRa News Reports through half-lidded eyes, knowing it is far too hot to wait much longer. But he's known for three hours the very same thing, and still he eats his peanuts and starts to memorise the twenty-mninute newscast as it plays over and over, a loop of disinformation and redundant, useless misinformation for that much.  
  
It's mid-August in Junon, a place where the summers are the hottest on the planet. Costa del Sol may seem hotter to onlookers, but the giant power plant there generates enough heat to fry small birds, some having even spontaneously combusted in mid-air. He owns this restaraunt, a large sophisticated place called, simply, Stokes. He serves the finest food this side of Midgar, from cigar-shaped hamburgers -- Stokeys -- to his famous Cheddar Cheese Fries, which rival those of even the greatest chefs.  
  
It's dimly lit with a family atmosphere, one of those quiet places with masses of electricity you can feel in every heavy glance to the waiter in the Wutain robe that walks around, hair tied up. Maybe it's the friendly look he gives all the small children, even after his long past of trouble. Maybe he's looking for repentance, come the heated whispers behind the unforgiving eyes of former colleagues who could never make the cut. Or maybe he's putting on a ruse, the softer, unbelieving whispers from those who refuse to believe a man can change his fate and alter his image.  
  
He chokes out a dry laugh, shreds of peanut flying as he bites down hard, waking him from his momentary daze. He looks around. Realizes he's still alone. Then his blood-stained hands reach for another overly-salted fried peanut, de-shelled, placing it gingerly in his mouth and toying it among his lip with his tongue. Let them believe what they wish, he has spat such words to the wind far too many times in these short years, the Stokes Years as he calls them.  
  
He often thinks back to the days where repentance was just another week's vocabulary word, the days when his mother forced him to go to piano lessons. He mimicked himself, his seven-year-old voice, stubborn, as he complained about only losers taking piano. He wanted to play the drums, of course. And his friend Rudolph wanted to play the saxophone, and together they would be the strangest and best band the major cities had ever seen. "Drum People Having Sax," he had playfully called it, enticing giggles from he and his friend both.  
  
Now the days of drum and sax dreams were over. More like guns and tacks those days, years later, or, at least for good old Rudolph, who had perished fatefully from a stab wound while out patrolling Sector Five. A mugger with a widely-known nack for Three-Card Monty had blind-sided him with a knife after swiping his magnum, though Reno's mag-rod had flipped out and caught the bugger in the neck, leaving two pale marks beneath a ring of black, seared flesh as the man squirmed on the ground in a pained fetal position.  
  
Now the man at the bar had shaved his stubble and cleaned his hair, the latter pinned up with oriental styling sticks given to him as a grand opening present. His robe, teal to match his bloodshot eyes, always drags on the ground just enough to make his feet a hiding place, and it marches gallantly with him as he makes his way up and down the steps to the raised grand piano everynight.  
  
Yes, he remembers all of his old lessons, though taken regretfully and reluctantly, ans had conjured himself quite the following. People always tell him to go professional, to which he mournfully shakes his head and replies that the world will never accept him for who he was and who he will never escape, that killer on a white-coated boy's payroll. Though he has been accepted as a full-blooded Wutain and given up all of his weapons, he is still seen as that man.  
  
Taking two peanuts into crimson fingers, he rolls them uselessly down his tongue and looks on in mild amusement as a commercial for his own restaurant comes on. He himself stands infront of the big white building, giving a big, dorky grin and saying how the concerts are every Thursday. His robe is sticking to his worn and torn body, and yet it seems a useless gesture to fan himself or even move his slowly-sliding elbows from the bar to let circulation come through.  
  
He hears a barking from behind him, and turns on the barstool to see his girlfriend standing there, being snarled at by his pitbull, rightfully named Hate. He snaps his fingers and it silences itself, walking grudgingly back to where it was laying before and gnawing the bone it hadn't finished earlier, complete with banged-up wedding ring, His legs dislodge the head of the corpse, momentarily confusing the poor dog, before he obliviously goes back to his mechanical chewing, ignoring the many wounds on the dead man, along with the bite-marks from the waist down.  
  
His girlfriend clasps a hand to her pretty Wutain mouth, slender legs nearly buckling at the sight. A choked gasp comes from her throat beneath her beautiful brown eyes, shaken and obscured by tears. "Oh, Reno..." He uncaringly stands up and saunters to the body, kicking the man's left ear. His neck, held together by a thin strip of flesh, twists as the head rolls in a semi-circle, and he smiles warily, preparing to cry himself.  
  
It was the same as when he stopped drinking, a slow but successful task, and Yuffie knew that was as true as it got with him.  
  
Sometimes, he still needed to have a drink, no matter how he got it.  
  
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-Fin  
  
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End file.
